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Pedestrians wear a mask as they walk past a sign reminding the public to take steps to prevent July 23 coronavirus in Glendale, California.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Russian intelligence officials are a trio of English-based websites to spread incorrect information about the coronavirus pandemic, seeking to exploit a crisis that the U.S. is experiencing before the November presidential election, U.S. officials said today.
In the past, the data had been classified, but officials said they had been demoted so that they could be discussed more freely. Officials said they were doing so now to sound the alarm on specific internet sites and reveal a connection between Russian internet sites and intelligence services.
Between defeated May and early July, one of the officials said, a trio published about 150 articles on the reaction to the pandemic, adding policies to support Russia and denigrate the United States.
Headlines that caught the attention of U.S. officials included: “Russian aid opposed to COVID-19 to the United States is advancing the de-escalation factor,” suggesting that Russia has urgent and truly extensive assistance to the United States to combat the pandemic, and “Beijing believes COVID-19 is a biological weapon.”
The revelation comes at a time when the spread of misinformation, which adds up across Russia, is a pressing fear in the run-up to the November presidential election, as US officials seek to avoid a repeat of the 2016 contest, when Russia introduced a covert social network. to divide American public opinion in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. The country’s counterintelligence leader warned in public Friday about Russia’s continued use of Internet trolls to advance its goals.
Even outside politics, the two crises that are shaking up the country and much of the global — the pandemic and race relations and demonstrations — have provided fertile territory for incorrect information or falsification of lies.
Officials described misinformation as a component of an ongoing and persistent Russian effort to sow confusion. They did not say whether the effort was directly similar to the November election, some of the policies on the Internet sites seemed to denigrate Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. The stories recall Russia’s efforts in 2016 to exacerbate race relations in the United States and fuel corruption allegations that oppose American politicians.
U.S. officials chose a news agency, InfoRos.ru, that manages a trio of internet sites InfoRos.ru, Infobrics.org and OneWorld.press, which they say exploited the pandemic to publicize anti-Western targets and spread misinformation.
The sites announce their stories in a complicated but insidious effort that officials equate with money laundering, where English stories are well written, and with a pro-Russian and anti-American sentiment. sentiment: they have gone through other data resources to hide their origin and strengthen the legitimacy of the data.
The sites also magnify the stories of other places, the government said.
Sites also about fresh politics. A headline today in InfoRos.ru about the turmoil in major American cities says, “Chaos in the Blue Cities,” accompanying a tale that laments how New Yorkers who grew up in crime-fighting mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg’s technique “must adapt to life in urban areas of high crime.”
Another short story titled “Ukrainian Trap for Biden” and stated that “Ukrainegate”, a reference to the stories surrounding the former links of Biden’s son Hunter with a Ukrainian fuel company, “continues to extend with renewed vigour.”
Two other people who also held high-level positions at InfoRos, known today as Denis Valeryevich Tyurin and Aleksandr Gennadyevich Starunskiy, have served in the past in a GRU unit specializing in army mental intelligence and have deep contacts there, the authorities said.
InfoRos and One World’s links to the Russian state have already attracted European disinformation analysts.
In 2019, an EU organization that ran disinformation campaigns read One World as “a new addition to the Pantheon of Moscow-based disinformation sites.” The executing organization noted that one World’s content broke the Russian state’s schedule in trouble such as the war in Syria.
A report published last month through a non-governmental organization, EU DisinfoLab, founded in Brussels, tested the links between InfoRos and One World and the intelligence of the Russian army. The researchers knew technical clues that linked it to Russia and knew some monetary links between InfoRos and the government.
“InfoRos operates in a shaded gray area, where normal data activities are combined with more debatable movements that may be similar to Russian state data operations,” the report’s authors concluded.
On her English Facebook page, InfoRos describes itself as a “news agency: the global eyes of Russia.”
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